Blogging in a RESTful manner…

John Bailey at the Alaska Volcano Observatory & Arctic Region Supercomputing Center sent Frank Taylor and I an information-packed email with heaps of stuff that is bound to be relevant to Ogle Earth readers, so I’m posting it here verbatim, embellished with just a few extra links:

I’d been meaning to email you with a few things that might have flown below your radar (not that much does), and in a couple of cases people have beaten me to it:

New Scientist: Frank heard about the New Scientist article from a reader. This was but together by Jon Blower as part of the follow-up to the NIEeS workshop he ran in Cambridge a few weeks ago. I was there, and it was an interesting experience — most notably for a chance to compare GE to World Wind to ArcGIS Explorer side-by-side (Note: the KML support in the latter is pretty bad still). Also, as a general theme of workshops to introduce/promote virtual globes to scientists this was one on the first big events, so it was good to see what worked & what didn’t. Look to see further followup appearing on NIEeS GridIndfo, their wiki.

KML Workshop: The leasons learnt in Cambridge I was able to put into action a few weeks latter at a small hands-on workshop I gave at the GSA cordilleran section meeting. You’ll notice the general layout of the KML exercises is similar to something the Google team put togther (and one of you blogged) and used in Cambridge and other events. I’m giving some internal workshops at the University of Alaska Fairbanks this summer, so I will be improving/developing what I have and keeping it online as a resource.

Science/Virtual Globes Events: There’s been a rash of conference/workshop events the lately but after ISDE there’s nothing new on the horizon. However, we are planning on putting on events at the AGU 2007 Fall Meeting again. I’ll send you more details when I have them. But in the meantime I update my conferences webpage at least once a month, so if you hear of anything good please let me know.

I also thought the following might be of interest as I submitted it a couple of weeks ago, just before Stefan posted his thoughts on KML3.0’s needs: It’s the full paper that accompanies the talk (Telling a story in Google Earth – the 2006 eruption of Augustine Volcano) I’ll be giving at ISDE5. Although the latter [talk] I haven’t prepared yet because who knows what Google or others might produce in the next month!

And for amusement, if you saw the Wired News article they wrote about me in January, that got picked up in the blogs another time and slightly re-written with an amusing title: Google Fights against Volcano Eruptions (!!!)

Other Virtual Globe Publications: Wall Street Journal article. I talked with the reporter about this, not really too sure why, I think he was initially planning to go in a different direction.

An interesting white paper on Microsoft Virtual Earth by Danyel Fisher, who notes that the map servers retain a record of all map tile requests. He says that “Tile server logs are standard IIS logs; they store an IP address, a date and times of access and a URL”. This might not be news in the world of virtual globes, but I’m not sure its been put in a reference-able paper before.

Random: You may or may not know that Rory Dooley contacted me about giving free SpaceNavigators to all those who presented at AGU… which he did. In return we have been providing feedback. Our friend Valery, since he had one given to him by Google when I took him to visit, gave his to David Ralliant who has been using it in ways it was not intended (as those two are apt to do).

Apparently he was planning to use it at the Virtual Globe Innovations in Paris during the French GIS show GeoEvenement he was part of and has promised to send pictures.

John also points to FeatureServer, which is a server application that lets you upload, edit and publish geospatial data using the REST “architecture”. (What is REST?). Output formats include both KML and GeoRSS, and there is a KML storage demo. Hard-core networking coders seem very excited about REST, so it will be interesting to see how geospatial implementations of it, like FeatureServer, develop.

And if you haven’t clicked on the link to the unorthodox use of the SpaceNavigator, then you’re really missing out on something:-)